The Big Uneasy:
At least they're having some fun in New Orleans on election day. Amazingly, in the mayor's race it's a dead heat. You can follow the returns as they come in at NOLA.
I just finished Douglas Brinkley's book on Katrina, The Great Deluge (highly recommended). I don't think people even now realize just how bad things were in New Orleans after the hurricane, flood and breakdown of civilization. Brinkley collected accounts of survivors and rescuers and reconstructs events to paint a picture of the natural and man-made disaster and of the suffering of those caught in the middle.
(A body lays rotting in the heat. I took this photo in central New Orleans a week after the storm. I was hesitant to post it in the first round of photos, but since a similar photo of the same body was published in Brinkley's book, I decided to go ahead and post it.)
Brinkley has plenty of criticism for people all levels of government who dropped the ball, but with Nagin running for re-election, today the focus is on him. From the book:
One person not often seen on the streets, at the Superdome, or on a rescue boat of any kind was Mayor Ray Nagin. Occasionally he'd pop up inside the Superdome, clinging to the exit doors, then disappear. Since the storm had approached the Crescent CIty, Mayor Nagin had been cloistered in the Hyatt, lording over the Superdome. From the get-go he was terrified for his own personal safety...
As things reached crisis stage, Nagin did nothing.
...His primary post-storm initiative was to get a generator hooked up to the elevator so he wouldn't have to walk all those stairs [to get to his room in the Hyatt]...
...At the Superdome in New Orleans scared citizens needed Nagin. But he feared that if he mounted a soapbox at the Superdome, he'd get shot, lynched, or bloodied up. He made the costly mistake of viewing the displaced persons as malcontents. He had squandered the golden moment, putting his own personal safety ahead of those poor and elderly in trouble.
Nagin's inaction, incompetence, lack of planning, lack of coordination and lack of judgement, as described by Brinkley, was stunning. Landrieu on the other hand, comes off looking much better. He did go out in rescue boats and, according to Brinkley, acquitted himself well in the crisis.
I can only imagine Nagin's campaign slogan: "Hey it probably won't happen again, but if it does, I'll try to be less ineffective."
UPDATE: Here's an articulate slate of endorsements from a poster at the New Orleans Metroblog.
